Speech Analysis Using Praat Software in between Native and Nonnative speakers of English
Abderrahim Bouderbane · 2024
This research investigates the characteristics of speaking fluently by analyzing its main components like pauses, filled pauses, and hesitations.These components are very important in speaking, and they are used generally to generate ideas, plan what to say next and organize the content.The sample in this research is composed of 20 participants split between 10 native speakers and 10 non-native speakers who were selected randomly.The nature of this research determined the selection of the participants, as they should be proficient in English even non-native speakers of English.This research is to compare samples of recorded speech samples of native and non-native speakers of English to distinguish between pauses, fillers and hesitations.The samples are evaluated using software called Praat.This analysis is based mainly on three main steps which are counting the total time of speaking, then we compare between the pauses' length of native and non-native speakers on an adjustable level of up to 5000 or 6000 Hz;.This is generally the highest level of pauses length in Praat measurements.After that, speech rate and hesitation phenomena (pauses, hesitations and fillers) are compared to using the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient (r).The results indicate that native speakers engage in genuine real life communication with the support of both language knowledge and topic knowledge and produce speech automatically.Non-native speakers on the other hand, require different proceduralization of information and they produce speech in stages, and they require a lot of time to think about what to say next and produce more hesitation phenomenon.